Monday, 26 May 2008

Is there blood coming out of my ears?

It should sound about right that, for my first lacework project, I picked a pattern by Rowan (and thus short on the explicit pattern notes/charts/any help whatsoever), which has only been knitted a handful of times by anybody on Ravelry and is therefore short on project notes and discussions; and that I picked to knit this in a completely different yarn weight, which knits up to a different gauge; and that I should wish to modify said pattern to avoid seaming because I am lazy; and that, as well as all this, I should decide not to be fettered by Rowan's puny sizing and instead rewrite the pattern for my measurements and to my gauge.

Really, you know this is going to end in tears. To add insult to injury, when I tried to unravel my gauge swatch and the yarn snapped, I realised there can be no errors, unless I want to end up binning that entire km of baby kid I was winding in the swift pictures.

It's not beyond me. Absolutely not. I got an A in GCSE maths, I can totally count the stitches in my swatch and rewrite the pattern. I could probably even do it in my head.

Here is the problem, though - there are increases for side seam shaping which affect the lacework pattern, and I can't for the life of me work out how to incorporate them without messing up the rest of the lacework. I did my usual trick of emailing/essaging anybody I could find who had knitted it and seeing what would come back, and the first response suggested charting it. What a great idea! I thought - what else are inclement Bank Holiday Mondays for?

(Incidentally, this is the most inclement one I can remember in ages. I actually had to get the hammock in before it blew away.)

Here is how far I got...

I can't make it right. I just can't. How can I increase a stitch at one end, and decrease it next time round, replacing it with an increase at the other end....and not shift the whole lace pattern over one?